Innovation in Latin America through the lens of bibliometrics: crammed and fading away

Research in the field of innovation in business, management, and accounting (BMA) in Latin America (LATAM) has surpassed all expectations of its net output. Yet this digital tide suggests several concerns regarding its impact and both its established and emergent research topics at the individual, institutional, and country level. In this paper, an outlook of the field was developed based on a sample of + 1300 documents indexed in Scopus from 1983 to 2018. Public institutions in Brazil and Colombia have been both the most cited and productive in the region. Nevertheless, documents lead by non-LATAM authors showed significant differences in both paper citations and journals’ h-index compared to leading authors from LATAM. Three of the major concerns raised were, first, a growing inter-regional gap among LATAM countries. Second, the intensive use of a journal with predatory features over the last 5 years, therefore cites/document measure is at the lowest point of the past 17 years. And third, the delay of recently emergent topics in the region that have been in the literature for more than a decade, while frontier topics for BMA innovation such as those of Industry 4.0 remain unnoticed.